My brother sent me a very old photo of our mother recently. It was taken during WWII, so the photo had to be at least 70 years old. Once we joined the war the local stockings factory was retooled to make socks for the soldiers and since the men who operated the factory were conscripted, their presence was replaced by women. The photo shows my mom and her girlfriends, smiling, happy, glad to be in each other’s company and working together, doing something useful while the men were away. Mom was standing in the center of the group, surrounded by her girlfriends. She had a small but well constructed figure and was wearing a dress of the day, modest but pretty and flattering to her figure. Even though there was a war on, their eyes and smiles showed the promise of a bright future. In the background were the machines they operated.
Mom often told stories about “the sock factory” days. She and her girlfriends would be gathered up by a bus that arrived at their front doors each morning and deposited them back to their largely female family every evening. Each family had turned their men over to the war. Their brothers, my uncles, were all at war. Sometimes it seemed that only old men and women were left in the country. It was probably so.
Their entertainment resources were meager but they made their lives fun. Mom would tell how oftentimes they would slip notes in the socks just before they were boxed up and shipped off. Knowing that the socks would be worn by soldiers far from home, the notes would let the soldiers know that they had not been forgotten. “Come home safe”, “Yes, I will wait for you” and of course the ubiquitous “P.S. I love you”. One young lady had the perfect lipstick kiss on paper, so she would be asked to kiss up to thirty slips of paper at a time. Mom said that by the time the war was over, she was undoubtedly a very good kisser. I wondered how the puzzled soldier who found a note in his socks felt; someone was thinking of him. Hopefully he too smiled, felt remembered, felt safe and warm, even just for a moment. "Come home safe, soldier." We're glad you did.
When I showed my husband the photo and told him the story, he said that his mother and her friends too would have something for “the boys”. His mother proudly held that she and her friends met each and every trainful of soliders that stopped through the town of McCook, NE ---- no matter the hour, day or night, the ladies were there on the platforms, waiting. Never was a train missed, his mother told. And when each train stopped, the soldiers were surprised and thoroughly pleased to be treated to cookies and sandwiches by pretty ladies who looked their best for “their boys”, knowing that these would be the last “home made” foods they would eat for a very very long time. For most of those young soldiers, this was their first time away from home. The food was devoured quickly and earnestly. Undoubtedly, a freshly baked cookie and a gentle smile was worth its weight in gold to an 18 year old lad. Many a young soldier smelled the cookie, closed his eyes and momentarily let his thoughts take him to a waiting place, somewhere safe and warm. To paraphrase then General Eisenhower's words: "boys left, men returned." And return they did to the women left behind.
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